Queer? An Exploration of Reality Through Means of Psychology and Art, 2005
Interdisciplinary Honor Thesis Project through the University of California, Riverside’s Psychology and Studio Art Departments. For this project, I designed and implemented an American Psychological Association Approved psychological experiment at a psycholinguistics laboratory run under the supervision of Dr. Dale Barr.
Participants were asked to look at a series of videos with different representations of people and some of their likes, traits, hobbies, flaws, and interesting things about them. After watching these videos participants were asked to share what they remembered about each individual person.
This experiment explored biases directed toward queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming individuals. The results of this experiment demonstrated that personal biases against queer, trans, and gender nonconforming people meant individuals most often only remembered these types of identity traits for these individuals and not for straight and gender-conforming individuals, who were granted more nuanced and complex identities. Below are the videos shown to participants who were a part of the study accompanied by quotes from them regarding what they remembered from the person.
With the support of professor Erika Suderburg in the school’s Art Department, the results, ephemera, and representations of this project were installed in the graduate studios as an immersive and interactive installation. Individuals who had been asked to participate in creating videos for the psychological experiment were asked to contribute items that represented their identities to an “identity buffet” that sat in the middle of the space. Visitors were invited to pick up a plate and create their own “identity plate,” drawing from the items on the “buffet table.”
